before as freemen, they now held by servile tenure of some powerful foreigner. Very often we find King William by his writ commending some Englishman to a Norman, making the Englishman the man of the Norman, to hold his lands of him and owe him service. We also find him assuming the feudal suzerain's right to marry an heiress or a widow to whom he pleased, so that in this way many estates passed by marriage into the hands of Normans.

This personal change, however, in the position of English landholders, was a slight and temporary thing compared to the great change which the Norman Conquest A new kind caused in the relation of all landholders to the of Feudalism State. It is this change which people allude introduced. to when they say that William introduced the feudal system into England. Now we have seen (Chapter VIII.) that a loose kind of feudalism already existed in England before the Conquest; what the Conquest did was to introduce a rigid feudalism, while at the same time the type of feudalism was entirely changed by the establishment of a strong central authority. The introduction of a more rigid feudalism was not brought about by any law or ordinance; it was done simply because the men who administered the law were Normans. In Normandy a very rigid feudalism prevailed. The Normans had settled in Normandy as a military colony, and their Duke was their hereditary captain. All Norman landholders held their land under strict condition of military service; the defence of the land was the rigid duty of all who enjoyed the land. The Duke, as captain of this army, settled on the land, had the right of insisting that the land should be held only by those who were capable of defending it. This was the origin of the right possessed by the Norman dukes and exercised by the Norman kings, of ruling the marriages of heiresses, and of guardianship over minors; the right of taking away land in punishment for certain offences; and various other rights, which were before unknown or almost unknown in England.1 When the Norman duke became king of England, he found the relation of lord and vassal existing on English soil, and what was more natural than that he should suppose that it meant exactly the same thing as it meant in Normandy, and that in England 1 See Gneist, Geschichte des Self-government in England, p. 59.

as in Normandy, the vassal only held his lands on condition of military service.1

made a de

fensive State.

Thus, in course of time, by the mere working of the Norman way of looking at things, all free tenures of land England in England (with few exceptions) became strictly feudal, that is, military duty became now the fixed obligation of landed property. The theory henceforth to rule was that all the land in the country belonged to the king, and that all landholders held it of him either mediately or immediately on condition of service, generally of military service. The change was a very valuable one; it made England a defensive state. The military system, which had been the weak point of the old English government, became the strong point of the Norman. It is an important mark of the change that, though fiefs were still heritable, the landholder was no longer able to bequeath his land.

The holders of real property were now strictly responsible for the defence of the country, and could not escape their duty. The service was equally divided according to the amount of property; every five hides must send a fully armed man for forty days' service. This had been a recognised obligation even in Old-English times, but the obligation lay on the landlord rather than on the land; it was not a condition of property, but the personal duty of men occupying a certain extent of country. Besides, the feudalism which existed then was too loose to bind the great landholders to their duties. We have read how in the hour of England's danger, Edwin and Morkar did not join Harold with the fyrd of the shires. In truth, the old Teutonic military system, which required every freeman to fight simply because he was a freeman, having fallen into decay, the new, strictly feudal system became a necessary stage in the development of all European nations, the system, namely, that those who held the land should provide for the defence of the State. No State could exist which was not a fighting State, in that time of universal war; no standing armies could be kept up in times when it was so difficult to get money, owing to the imperfect development of industry. The feudal system, the system of strictly military tenures, secured the safety

1 Compare what Sir H. S. Maine says, in Village Communities, of the change which the English have wrought in the working of Indian law, simply by reading it with English instead of Indian eyes.

of the State from external enemies, so long as there was a captain at the helm strong enough to manage his own crew.

secured.

And this was the second great feature of William's work, that he secured the position of the captain at the helm. For there was one thing which William was determined The King's that he would not have-he would not allow his supremacy vassals the same independence which the great vassals had in France. It is due to his strong will that the worst features of feudalism never prevailed in England. Himself a vassal of the King of France, he often defied his liege lord; but he was determined that none of his vassals should defy him. He had had enough of that in Normandy, where only a hard struggle with his barons had made him supreme; he wished to prevent any such struggle in England. He abolished the four great earldoms, that no earl might rival the king; henceforth, earls were appointed only to single shires, or, if he gave them two, he separated them; and those of his followers whom he trusted most, and to whom he gave largest estates, had these estates scattered in different parts of the country. This putting an end to the great earldoms was a most important stroke; for those great earldoms represented the ancient kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria, the four pieces into which England was always inclined to fall. Further, lest even the earls of the shires should become too powerful, he took care that the government of the shires should be mainly in the hands of the sheriffs, who were officers appointed by and dependent on himself. And in order that his nobles might never be able to use their own vassals against himself, he established his power over the under-vassals as well, by renewing the custom (as old as the days of Edmund I.) that all landholders, whose men soever they were, should swear him faithful oaths that they would be faithful to him against all other men. By these faithful oaths the throne of William became the strongest in Europe.

As he built up the English throne, so did he uphold the English Empire. The King of Scots bowed to him, and became his man in 1072. And it was probably The English on his victorious return from this expedition that empire upWilliam first acquired a solid footing in Northum- held. berland, Gospatrick, the English earl, being banished. The

William

Welsh also had to renew their submission (1081). gave great powers to the border earldoms of Chester, Shrewsbury, and Hereford to extend their dominions at the expense of the Welsh. It was only in cases like these, where the defence of the empire required it, that William allowed powerful earldoms to exist. Kent was one, as the bulwark of England against France and Flanders. But William gave this earldom to his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who being a churchman, could not found a rival family. In the same manner he gave the management of the earldom of Northumberland to the Bishop of Durham. And no doubt the great harrying of the Northern counties in 1069 had partly as its object to place a desert on the borders of the English and Scottish kingdoms. The authority of William in the extreme North of England was never very firmly settled; and in this part of the country we find more men of native birth in high position than in any other part. The four northernmost countries do not appear in the great survey which William caused to be made of all England. Only a part of what we now call Westmoreland and Cumberland was held by William; the rest belonged to the King of Scots. It was not till the reign of his son, William Rufus, that England grew to her present size on the map.

Danish invasions kept

off.

The Scots and the Welsh were not the only foes to be kept off from the English Empire. England's old kinsmen, the Danes, had still a hankering after her, and she was well disposed to welcome them as friends, and deliverers from the Norman. William used gold more than once to stave off their attacks; but when in 1085 he was threatened by a joint invasion from the Kings of Denmark and Norway (the great-nephew of Cnut and the son of Harold Hardrada), he not only brought a host of hired troops over to England, but ruthlessly laid waste all the land along the sea-coast, that the enemy might find no support in case they landed. On the west, the Norwegians (who held the Isle of Man in those days) gave much trouble to the Norman Earl of Chester; but he was a match for them and for the Welsh too, from whom he wrested much of North Wales and the Isle of Anglesea. But after the reign of William, the Northmen ceased to trouble England any more; the great wandering of the Northern nations was. drawing to a close.

This was the great work of William, that he made England a solid state, with a central authority; he tightened all the bonds of the state, and drew them up into the hands of the king. By this he has influenced our history ever since, and for this we are bound to reckon the Norman conquest as a great boon, in spite of all the suffering which it caused. Nay, that very suffering, as it was common to all the land, helped to weld all English kin together into one nation. There was now in England what there was nowhere else in Europe, a state, not a bundle of states loosely tied together. And there was order in this state; robbery and violence were put down with a strong hand, and the barons were not allowed to turn the realm upside down by wars with one another.

Not only did the State become organised and strong under William's sway, a like change went over the Church. But this must be left for another chapter.

Feudalism could not be strengthened without altering the character of the old English institutions. The great council of the nation, which had been the Wise Men's Meeting in the Old-English times, now became the assembly of the The Great tenants-in-chief, as those were called who held their Council. lands directly of the king; that is, it became an assembly of Norman barons and prelates. The 'counsel and consent' of the Great Council thus assembled was always asked by the conqueror and his successors; but the asking does not seem to have been much more than a matter of form.

nobles.

If, however, the great vassals were held in strict subordination to their suzerain, on the other hand their feudal rights over their own vassals were strengthened. A feudal Increased system is a system which puts great power in the power of hands of the nobles; and though in England the nobles had not such power as in France, because of the superior power of the Crown, they had enough to make their position odious to the common people, especially when the difference of race between Norman and Englishman added bitterness to the relation of lord and vassal. Also we cannot doubt that the extension of feudalism under the Conqueror hastened the process which had been going on in Anglo-Saxon times, whereby the common freemen were losing their independent rights in the land, such rights being now held under and by favour of some Norman Lord of the Manor.' Never